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JAMES ELLROY @MIDSUMMER MURDER ONE

30th May 2019

James Ellroy was born in Los Angeles in 1948. He is the author of the acclaimed ‘LA Quartet’: The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, LA Confidentialand White Jazz. His novel Blood’s a Rover completes the magisterial ‘Underworld USA Trilogy’– the first two volumes of which (American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand) were both Sunday Times
bestsellers. His most recent novel, Perfidia, is the first instalment in Ellroy’s second ‘L.A.Quartet’.

Like Perfidia, the first volume, This Storm is populated with characters from
Ellroy’s previous novels – including arch villain Dudley Smith from L.A. Confidential – in a grand drama of L.A. This Storm is Ellroy’s first novel in five years, and only his fifth in the last twenty.

Jame Ellroy will be in conversation with Eoin McNamee in Dublin’s stunning City Hall, on Thursday 30th May at Midsummer Murder One,BOOK HERE!

From ‘one of the great American writers of our time’ (Los Angeles Times BookReview) – This Storm is a brilliant historical crime novel, a pulse-pounding, as-it-happens narrative that unfolds in Los Angeles and Mexico in the wake of Pearl Harbor.

January, ’42. L.A. reels behind the shock of Pearl Harbor. Local Japanese are rounded up and slammed behind bars. Massive thunderstorms hit the city. A body is unearthed in Griffith Park.

The cops tag it a routine dead-man job. They’re wrong. It’s an early-warning signal of Chaos. There’s a murderous fire and a gold heist, exploding out of the past. There’s Fifth Column treason – at this moment, on American soil. There are homegrown Nazis, commies and race racketeers. There’s two dead cops in a dive off the jazz-club strip. And three men and one woman have a hot date with History.

Elmer Jackson is a corrupt Vice cop. He’s a flesh peddler and a bagman for the L.A. Chief of Police. Hideo Ashida is a crime-lab whiz, lashed by anti-Japanese rage. Dudley Smith is a PD hardnose working Army Intelligence. He’s gone rogue and gone all-the-way fascist. Joan Conville was born rogue. She’s a defrocked Navy lieutenant and a war profiteer to
her core.

This Storm is James Ellroy’s most audacious novel yet. It is by turns savage, tender, elegiac. It lays bare and celebrates crazed Americans of all stripes.

‘There has never been a writer like James Ellroy.’ – Telegraph
‘The master of American crime fiction.’ – Sunday Times
‘There surely can’t be a more richly or brutally realised city in world literature than James Ellroy’s Los Angeles.’ – Independent on Sunday
Perfidia: ‘James Ellroy is back doing what he does best, weaving a tangle of tales set in wartime Los Angeles…I look forward, eagerly, to the next three instalments.’ – The Times